SWAMPITY: Trump Nominee Rex Tillerson To Get $180M Exxon Payout In Advance Of Confirmation Hearing

The Guardian reports:

Exxon boss Rex Tillerson will receive more than $180m from the company as he severs financial ties with the oil industry to become Donald Trump’s secretary of state. Tillerson’s confirmation hearings begin next week. If confirmed, Tillerson will surrender all unpaid stock that was part of his pay package, more than 2m shares. In exchange, the company will make a cash payment equal to the value of those shares to a trust to be overseen by a third party, according to a regulatory filing on Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Some $54m of Tillerson’s stock options have already vested; he will be able to sell them at a much-reduced rate of tax, owing to laws that provide financial incentive to cabinet appointees to sell holdings that might conflict with their duties as public servants. Some have simply refused to do so, notably George W Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, who retained stock options in government contractor Halliburton, which substantially increased its business with the US government while Cheney was in office.

Tillerson, who built close ties, and a personal fortune, with officials at many foreign governments including Russia and Nigeria through Exxon’s links to their state oil companies, represents a unique set conflicts himself. Exxon said in its SEC filing that it hoped to minimize those conflicts by “working in close consultation with federal ethics authorities”, though it did not say which authorities.